San Diego Mission

The deep greens contrasting with the sunlit adobe in Josephine Joy's San Diego Mission evoke the verdant locale of California's first Spanish mission, Mission Basilica San Diego de Alcalá. The painting shows the historic building over time; cracked and exposed brick stands out against the intricate bell tower that was added to the structure during renovations in 1931.

The Works Progress Administration, A Depression-era federal agency that sponsored artists to create public art from 1935 to 1943, enlisted Joy to work on the Souhern California Art Project from 1936 to 1939, despite her lack of formal training. She took inspiration from California's twenty-one missions, which were founded between 1769 and 1823 along the coastline. The populations around these missions evolved into the state's major cities.

“I love to paint in the open, sitting in some beautiful garden, hillside or remote place or in Balboa Park [in San Diego], where I had sketched many pictures . . . I paint from nature but occasionally I find myself designing.” The artist, quoted in Cat and a Ball on a Waterfall: 200 Years of California Folk Painting and Sculpture, 1986